An Analysis of the Impact of Environmental Initiatives and Measures on Socioeconomics in New York City

Introduction
New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world, whether in terms of culture, income, or background. Being one of the largest and most significant cities on the globe, it also is full of organizations, groups and initiatives creating change in new and exciting ways. With the increased emphasis on sustainable solutions and environmental awareness over the recent decades, New York is one of many cities making constant changes at both a government and local community level when it comes to sustainability. This project aims to take a look at the numerous initiatives, changes, and measures in the field of sustainability and the built environment and analyze how they impact and interact with the socioeconomic makeup of the city.
Background
New York City is divided into 5 immensely diverse boroughs, each with significant differences in history, culture, and residents. The city is divided further into Community Districts (or Neighborhoods) which give a zoomed in look at the different communities within the city. Some neighborhoods such as East Harlem or Greenwich Village/Soho are etched in media and culture. Some such as Williamsburg are known as up-and-coming neighborhoods defining the new era of the city. Each neighborhood comes with its own stories – and stereotypes – which this project hopes to further unpack. For this reason, the project will often use both these community districts and the boroughs when analyzing the socioeconomic and environmental differences within the city.
Boroughs of New York City
Before diving into the different measures of sustainability, we began by performing an analysis of socioeconomic measures within the city. We chose to focus on race and poverty within the city and its districts. We began by mapping concentrated poverty by community district. Concentrated poverty is a measure which denotes areas with high levels of poverty (30% or more). Therefore, a district with a high proportion of concentrated poverty has large or numerous areas with high levels of residents in poverty.
Looking at the results of the map, two or three areas of the city emerge with high levels of poverty. The northern districts of Brooklyn such as Bedford/Stuyvesant (will often be referred to as Bed-Stuy), Brownsville, and Williamsburg/Greenpoint (will often be referred to as Williamsburg), the Bronx, and East Harlem can all be seen to have elevated levels of concentrated poverty.
We also chose to map the poverty data in 2010 to better contextualize the changes in these demographics over the time frame we will be looking at. Interestingly, the greatest changes in poverty seem to be in these same areas highlighted for having high poverty levels in 2020. Areas like Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, and the Bronx were still among the highest in concentrated poverty, but by an even more drastic amount. This shows us that these poorer areas are improving significantly over time with respect to this measure of poverty. This reasonings for this will be explored throughout the project and are of great significance.
We then chose to map the population proportions of difference races within the city. This was not only for contextual purposes but also to see how closely these demographic differences are tied to poverty levels within the city.
After mapping this data, it can clearly be seen that there does tend to be higher proportions of minority populations, specifically Black and Hispanic populations within the community districts with high levels of poverty. The reasons for this are vast and cannot be fully explored at the moment, but it is important to recognize they exist and how race and poverty, and community are connected within the scope of New York City.
With this basic understanding of racial and economic distribution throughout the districts, we wanted to explore the element of sustainability and environmental initiatives and measures to learn how they interact with the socioeconomic factors. Some of the immediate questions that inspired this exploration were those such as ‘Do different races have equal access to sustainable infrastructure?’ and ‘How do these initiatives impact property values and wealth within a district?’ This project is not going to focus as much on what environmental initiatives were put in place or how initiatives were put into action but rather both the positive and negative benefits these initiatives and measures can have on a community from a socioeconomic standpoint.
There are clearly numerous positive impacts of sustainable initiatives. One does not have to look much further than a measure such as air quality to see how initiatives can have valuable health and lifestyle impacts citywide. Strict state-led programs to cut pollution have seen clear benefits across the city.

Further analyzing where these strides have been made and where particle content (low air quality) is highest, one can see that for the most part, it is concentrated around Brooklyn and Manhattan. Centers of lower air quality shifted to now include much of Northwest Brooklyn and the Bronx, potentially showing disproportionate improvements over the 10-year process. While it is certainly not enough to claim that these initiatives were less effective in these lower income neighborhoods, it is a good introduction to how the clear positive benefits of sustainable solutions can often be more complex when analyzed in more specific contexts.
We also took a look at Green infrastructure and its growing role within the city. The New York City Environmental protection department has been rapidly documenting and developing green infrastructure projects and features throughout the city. Green Infrastructure can take many forms and is defined as infrastructure which plays a role in managing and filtering rainfall and storm water. It has numerous benefits in keeping a community safe and clean by filtering out things like bacteria, trash, metals and pollutants from the water. It also provides benefits of mitigating flooding risks, which is extremely valuable for potentially low income and susceptible areas. We wanted to investigate if these kinds of benefits are available across the city or are there certain areas where this infrastructure is less developed.